page_title: Alice Roosevelt Longworth
section_title: Political connections
hierarchical_section_title: Alice Roosevelt Longworth / Political connections
caption_attribution_description: English: Mrs. Nicholas Longworth and Miss Joanna Sturm escorted by a White House Social Aide arriving at the East Gate of the White House [for the wedding of Tricia Nixon and Edward Cox]
context_page_description: Alice Lee Roosevelt Longworth was an American writer and prominent socialite. She was the eldest child of U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt and the only child of Roosevelt and his first wife, Alice Hathaway Lee.
  Longworth led an unconventional and controversial life. Her marriage to Representative Nicholas Longworth III, a party leader and 38th Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, was shaky, and her only child, Paulina, was from her affair with Senator William Edgar Borah of Idaho.
context_section_description: From an early age, Alice was interested in politics. When advancing age and illness incapacitated her Aunt Bamie, Alice stepped into her place as an unofficial political adviser to her father. She warned her father against challenging the renomination of William Howard Taft in 1912. Alice took a hard-line view of the Democrats and in her youth sympathized with the conservative wing of the Republican Party. She supported her half-brother Ted when he ran for governor of New York in 1924. When Franklin D. Roosevelt ran for president in 1932, Alice publicly opposed his candidacy. Writing in the Ladies' Home Journal in October 1932, she said of FDR, "Politically, his branch of the family and ours have always been in different camps, and the same surname is about all we have in common..... I am a Republican..... I am going to vote for Hoover..... If I were not a Republican, I would still vote for Mr. Hoover this time."
  Although Alice did not support John F. Kennedy in the 1960 election, she became very enamored of the Kennedy family and "learned how amusing and attractive Democrats could be." She developed an affectionate, although sometimes strained, friendship with Bobby Kennedy, perhaps because of his relatively thin skin. When Alice privately made fun of his scaling the newly named Mount Kennedy in Canada, he was not amused. She even admitted to voting for President Lyndon Johnson over Senator Barry Goldwater in 1964 because she believed Goldwater was too mean.
  Alice developed a genuine friendship with Richard Nixon when he was vice president, and when he returned to California after Eisenhower's second term, she kept in touch and did not consider his political career to be over. Alice encouraged Nixon to reenter politics and continued to invite him to her famous dinners. Nixon returned these favors by inviting her to his first formal White House dinner and to the 1971 wedding of his daughter Tricia Nixon.
caption: Alice Roosevelt Longworth with Joanna Sturm, her granddaughter, at Tricia Nixon's wedding in 1971
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